Then at last it was the turn of the police van. They moved down the red laterite slope on to the raft, and then edged foot by foot across the dark styx-like stream towards the woods on the other side. The two ferrymen pulling on the rope wore nothing but girdles, as though they had left their clothes behind on the bank where life ended, and a third man beat time to them, making do for instrument in this between-world with an empty sardine-tin. The wailing tireless voice of the living singer shifted backwards.
This was only the first of three ferries that had to be crossed, with the same queue forming each time. Scobie never succeeded in sleeping properly again; his head began to ache from the heave of the van: he ate some aspirin and hoped for the best He didn’t want a dose of fever when he was away from home. It was not Pemberton that worried him now - let the dead bury their dead - it was the promise he had made to Louise. Two hundred pounds was so small a sum: the figures rang their changes in his aching head like a peal of bells: 200 002 020: it worried him that he could not find a fourth combination: 002 200 020.
They had come beyond the range of the tin-roofed shacks and the decayed wooden settlers’ huts; the villages they passed through were bush villages of mud and thatch: no light showed anywhere: doors were closed and shutters were up, and only a few goats’ eyes watched the headlamps of the convoy. 020 002 200 200 002
020. Ali squatting in the body of the van put an arm around his shoulder holding a mug of hot tea - somehow he had boiled another kettle in the lurching chassis. Louise was right - it was like the old days. If he had felt younger, if mere had been no problem of 200 020 002, he would have been happy. Poor Pemberton’s death would not have disturbed him - that was merely in the way of duty, and he had never liked Pemberton. ‘My head humbug me, Ali.’
‘Massa take plenty aspirin.’
‘Do you remember, Ali, that two hundred 002 trek we did twelve years ago in ten days, along the border; two of the carriers went sick...’
He could see in the driver’s mirror Ali nodding and beaming. It seemed to him that this was all he needed of love or friendship. He could be happy with no more in the world than this - the grinding van, the hot tea against his lips, the heavy damp weight of the forest, even the aching head, the loneliness. If I could just arrange for her happiness first, he thought, and in the confusing night he forgot for the while what experience had taught him - that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness. ‘One hour more,’ Ali said, and he noticed that the darkness was thinning. ‘Another mug of tea, Ali, and put some whisky in it.’ The convoy had separated from them a quarter of an hour ago, when the police van had turned away from the main road and bumped along a by-road farther into the bush. He shut his eyes and tried to draw his mind away from the broken peal of figures to the distasteful job. There was only a native police sergeant at Bamba, and he would like to be clear in his own mind as to what had happened before he received the sergeant’s illiterate report. It would be better, he considered reluctantly, to go first to the Mission and see Father Clay.
Father Clay was up and waiting for him in the dismal little European house which had been built among the mud huts in laterite bricks to look like a Victorian presbytery. A hurricane-lamp shone on the priest’s short red hair and his young freckled Liverpool face. He couldn’t sit still for more than a few minutes at a time, and then he would be up, pacing his tiny room from hideous oleograph to plaster statue and back to oleograph again. ‘I saw so little of him,’ he wailed, motioning with his hands as though he were at the altar. ‘He cared for nothing but cards and drinking. I don’t drink and I’ve never played cards - except demon, you know, except demon, and that’s a patience. It’s terrible, terrible.’ ‘He hanged himself?’
‘Yes. His boy came over to me yesterday. He hadn’t seen him since the night before, but that was quite usual after a bout, you know, a bout. I told him to go to the police. That was right, wasn’t it? There was nothing I could do. Nothing. He was quite dead.’
‘Quite right. Would you mind giving me a glass of water and some aspirin?’ ‘Let me mix the aspirin for you. You know, Major Scobie, for weeks and months nothing happens here at all. I just walk up and down here, up and down, and then suddenly out of the blue ... it’s terrible.’ His eyes were red and sleepless: he seemed to Scobie one of those who are quite unsuited to loneliness. There were no books to be seen except a little shelf with his breviary and a few religious tracts. He was a man without resources. He began to pace up and down again and suddenly, turning on Scobie, he shot out an excited question. ‘Mightn’t there be a hope that it’s murder?’
‘Hope?’
‘Suicide,’ Father Clay said. ‘It’s too terrible. It puts a man outside mercy. I’ve been thinking about it all night.’
‘He wasn’t a Catholic. Perhaps that makes a difference. Invincible ignorance, eh?’
‘That’s what I try to think.’ Half-way between oleograph and statuette he suddenly started and stepped aside as though he had encountered another on his tiny parade. Then he looked quickly and slyly at Scobie to see whether his act had been noticed.
‘How often do you get down to the port?’ Scobie asked.
‘I was there for a night nine months ago. Why?’
‘Everybody needs a change. Have you many converts here?’
‘Fifteen. I try to persuade myself that young Pemberton had time - time, you know, while he died, to realize ...’
‘Difficult to think clearly when you are strangling, Father.’ He took a swig at the aspirin and the sour grains stuck in his throat ‘If it was murder you’d simply change your mortal sinner, Father,’ he said with an attempt at humour which wilted between the holy picture and the holy statue.
‘A murderer has time ...’ Father Clay said. He added wistfully, with nostalgia, ‘I used to do duty sometimes at Liverpool Gaol.’
‘Have you any idea why he did it?’
‘I didn’t know him well enough. We didn’t get on together.’
‘The only white men here. It seems a pity.’
‘He offered to lend me some books, but they weren’t at all the kind of books I care to read - love stories, novels ...’
‘What do you read, Father?’
‘Anything on the saints, Major Scobie. My great devotion is to the Little Flower.’
‘He drank a lot, didn’t he? Where did he get it from?’
‘Yusef’s store, I suppose.’
‘Yes. He may have been in debt?’
‘I don’t know. It’s terrible, terrible.’
Scobie finished his aspirin. ‘I suppose I’d better go along.’ It was day now outside, and there was a peculiar innocence about the light, gentle and clear and
fresh before the sun climbed. ‘I’ll come with you. Major Scobie.’
The police sergeant sat in a deck-chair outside the D.C.’s bungalow. He rose and raggedly saluted, then immediately in his hollow unformed voice began to read his report. ‘At 3.30 p.m. yesterday, sah, I was woken by D.C.’s boy, who reported that D.C. Pemberton, sah ...’
‘That’s all right, sergeant, I’ll go inside and have a look round.’ The chief clerk waited for him just inside the door.
The living-room of the bungalow had obviously once been the D.C.’s pride - that must have been in Butterworth’s day. There was an air of elegance and personal pride in the furniture; it hadn’t been supplied by the Government. There were eighteenth-century engravings of the old colony on the wall and in one bookcase were the volumes that Butterworth had left behind him - Scobie noted some titles and authors, Maitland’s Constitutional History, Sir Henry Maine, Bryce’s Holy Roman Empire, Hardy’s poems, and the Doomsday Records of Little Withington, privately printed. But imposed on all this were the traces of Pemberton - a gaudy leather pouf of so-called native work, the marks of cigarette-ends on the chairs, a stack of the books Father Clay had disliked - Somerset Maugham, an Edgar Wallace, two Horlers, and spread-eagled on the settee, Death Laughs at Locksmiths, The room was not properly dusted and Butterworth’s books were stained with damp.